About vendor approvals

Vendor approval adds controls to your vendor creation and vendor update workflow, requiring approval before any new and updated information can be used in Accounts Payable and Purchasing transactions.

How it works

When vendor approval is enabled, vendors are automatically submitted to the Approve vendor queue after they are created or edited. Approvers that you designate review the vendor records and either approve or decline them.

While a vendor is awaiting approval, or if the vendor is declined, users cannot do the following:

  • Post Accounts Payable and Purchasing transactions for that vendor
  • Edit existing transactions for the vendor
  • Select vendor transactions for payment

Users can save new transactions as drafts, even for submitted or declined vendors. This allows you to capture new transactions as they comes in, then post them after the vendor is approved. This also means that incoming draft transactions from AP Automation are saved normally.

If a vendor is declined, the submitter can edit the vendor record and resubmit it for approval.

Transactions outside of Accounts Payable or Purchasing can reference any vendor regardless of the vendor state.

When can you edit vendor records?

When vendor approval is enabled, you can edit a vendor as long as the vendor does not have any payment requests that are active in the workflow.

This means that to edit a vendor with active payment requests, you first need to do one of the following: 

  • Complete the payment process.
  • Cancel payment requests to return the bills to an unselected state.
On the View payment requests page, you can see all payment requests that are not yet complete. Filter for the vendor you want to edit to find the payment requests that need to be resolved. Payment requests with a payment status of Draft are payments that were added to the Outbox.

Tracking changes

Track the approval status for vendors using the following:

  • State field: Visible in the vendor record and on the Vendors list, this shows whether the vendor is in a Submitted, Approved, or Declined state.
  • History tab: Available on the vendor record when approval is enabled, this shows who created, submitted, and approved or declined the vendor.
  • Audit trail: The audit trail for the vendor record shows field values that were changed when a vendor was edited.

Before you enable vendor approval

Vendor approval uses a single-level approval structure that you configure at the top level. You designate an approver or a pool of approvers by assigning vendor approval permissions.

As part of the setup process, all vendors are set to the Approved state. Before you begin, review you the vendor list for your company, at both the top level and the entity level, to make sure that you’re ready to record the vendors as approved. Make any edits necessary.

The admin user who configures approval in Accounts Payable must have approval permissions and be unrestricted. Sage Intacct updates the audit trail to record each vendor as approved and lists the admin user as the one who completed the workflow action. You can remove the approval permission for the admin user after all vendors are updated.

The process of updating the audit trail might take some time, depending on how many vendors you have. Users will not be able to add, edit, delete, or import vendors until the process completes, so you might want to enable this feature during off hours.

When the audit trail update is done, you can update the Vendors list as needed. Be sure to add any additional approvers necessary and invite them to configure their notifications so that they can receive updates.

Regional availability

Vendor approval is generally available in any region.

Limitations

Vendor 1099 transaction update by CSV import does not support vendor approval. The status for vendors updated with these import templates remains unchanged after import.